Latest / Clean Power Hour / BBB Bill Bombshell, What’s New With Solar And Batteries In 2025?

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BBB Bill Bombshell, What’s New With Solar And Batteries In 2025? · Clean Power Hour

• 0:51
  Tim Montague: Tim, welcome to the Clean Power Hour live. It's Friday, July the 11th. I'm Tim Montague, your host. Check out all of our content at Clean Power Hour cleanpowerhour.com, and with that, I will welcome my co host, John Weaver, the commercial solar guy, what's up, dude,
• 1:09
  John Weaver: were you going to say cleanpower.live. Tim, because it sounded like you were about to say, I
• 1:14
  Tim Montague: probably have the dot live. But anyway, cleanpowerhour.com. We're breaking down the latest and greatest in solar, batteries and other renewable technologies.
• 1:24
  Tim Montague: We're going to be talking about the BBB, the big, beautiful bill that's not so beautiful this for the solar industry. But rest assured, there is a future for clean energy in the United States and elsewhere. Would you agree or disagree? John Weaver,
• 1:40
  John Weaver: I mean, else are without a doubt. I mean, we could talk about New headlines around the world of new capacity growing so it's only us who are going to get kicked in the face.
• 1:49
  John Weaver: That's just the reality. But elsewhere, it's great. You know, the headlines just show it constantly happening. So it's and it's going to be good here too. It's going to be complex.
• 2:01
  John Weaver: Might take some time, and solar and wind just gotta, you know, punch in the face. And we have some other dynamics, but that's just the nature of our politics at this stage. So, so we'll grow, we'll evolve, and, yeah, continue. I mean, we're
• 2:18
  Tim Montague: gonna, we're gonna put a story about Norton rose on the screen here in a second. But I wanted to share John with you one of my thoughts about this, and that is, yes, there's going to be a contraction in the solar industry. When you take away the ITC, that's going to cause a contraction, and it's going to hit the residential market first and then commercial in the long run, I think about the grid and the needs that we have with a growing economy, with the growth of AI data centers, the growth of electrification, of transportation and everything, we need a lot more juice. And so if you're a power plant operator, you're putting your cards on the table going, Okay, I've got nuclear, I've got hydro, I've got coal, I've got gas, I've got wind, I've got solar, I've got batteries, and I'm thinking five years at least into the future, going what is going to be my LCOE and my best bet for me and my investors, and you know what John solar and wind and batteries are going to float to the top of that list almost every Time, despite the ITC situation and the fioc, the fioc is more problematic, in my opinion, the foreign entities of concern, China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. China is the only one that really matters here, because none of those other countries make solar equipment at any scale, but China makes 70 plus percent of our solar equipment. So where are we going to get all these solar cells, inverters, inverter parts, okay, yeah, everything's being made in Southeast Asia now. But is the Fiat gonna jam that up? John,
• 4:08
  John Weaver: um, it's gonna add some complexity, without a doubt. You know, if it's just wafers and polysilicon that are coming from China, we're going to be able to manage it, because there's a lot of value add that occurs between a wafer and a solar panel. So wafer is going to be one to two cents per watt out of a module that we're going to pay 30 to 40 cents for, and if we double or triple the price importing the wafer, still going to be a six cent wafer or an eight cent wafer, or whatever it is, and it's going to be less than whatever percentage it's necessary. But what's so for solar? For solar, particularly fioc, will, I think be okay, um, but even if solar fioc was really aggressive, you know, the ITC is going away for solar, and right there won't be a tax credit in two years or in 2028 so who cares?
• 5:06
  Tim Montague: So the Fiat doesn't apply or doesn't impact anything except the ITC,
• 5:12
  John Weaver: yeah, yeah, it's, and that's, in essence, you, you become ineligible for, for the ITC, okay, your Fiat stuff is off. So for solar, it's going away, yeah, and, but with, with other stuff, it's going to be, you know, batteries, it will different. So we'll have to, you know, with batteries, it can be a little more complex, because batteries are coming, they're going to keep growing. They have the ITC through 2033, and right now battery cells are Chinese.
• 5:42
  John Weaver: Now we do have South Korean battery cells. We do have Japanese battery cells. We do have some US battery cells. But the real cost competitive systems are coming out of China.
• 5:53
  John Weaver: So yeah. So yeah, Fiat is going to be a challenge.
• 6:01
  Tim Montague: Yeah, and the industry has been through challenges, maybe not quite as severe as this. I don't know. I have not been through a down period as great as this. I got into solar in 2016 so I heard Nico Johnson on Barry cinnamon show saying that he's been through two other downturns, and he got in, I think, in the early 2000s What are your takeaways from the Norton rose Fulbright article.
• 6:37
  John Weaver: For this one, I wanted to just bring it up for everybody to have access to.
• 6:39
  John Weaver: This is was shared on my LinkedIn and on my blue sky account. This is a good document from somebody who's really in the know on these and if you guys want to, if you want to read some stuff about the changes in the laws and what to learn about. This is a great place to start. It just, it just has a lot of great, high level summaries. And this is the base of where my research is going to make sure I'm paying attention to it. You know, the biggest thing that matters is that projects need to get moving. You know, the solar ITC is going away. I believe at the end of this year, the solar it drops from 30% to 18% I think that's still the case. And then and 2027 it drops to like 6% so I'm a little bit confused whether they kept that drop in there or whether they took it out. I think they kept it in there. But either way, at the end of 27 it's gone, and your project has to be connected to the grid by the end of 27 and if you scroll up in the 48x section and the construction start, and everything you know these, you know, there's a lot of nuances to roll through here. But there's, there's a lot of construction start and construction completion date stuff that matters. There are still projects that are under construction for the prior ITC, which is now gone. So technically, the ITC is gone. It ended at the end of 2024, we're now in tech neutral credit or, yeah, energy neutral tech credit, that applies to everything. And so that's, you know, we're in a different world already with that. So what I would really do is tell everybody to go through this thing and really learn, you know what LinkedIn user just said, it didn't drop, which actually would make me really happy, because I got confused whoever's also listening to us, and they said that the ITC is if it's holding at 30% through the end of 27 that actually gives me a little headspace. I got a little wishy washy between the House version and the Senate version of what the final version is.
• 8:46
  John Weaver: The only one that drops is the manufacturing credits as our LinkedIn user. So that sounds pretty great. If you go, I'm looking at the chat right now.
• 8:55
  John Weaver: That's going on. Tim, yeah, and
• 8:57
  Tim Montague: yeah, that was my understanding. We have until the end of 2027, I think. But you know, it'll be here pretty quickly. That's the thing. You know, commercial solar projects take several years to develop.
• 9:10
  Tim Montague: And yeah, this will, this will cause a rush of projects to go to construction, both in resi and commercial. And then there'll be a cliff. And
• 9:24
  John Weaver: it's happening with us. We got four or five resi people who are saying, hey, let's move forward. Yeah. So it's happening there. We have a couple of commercial people who are starting to reach out saying, Hey, I'm hearing this in the news. What do I got to do?
• 9:36
  John Weaver: Is it time to move now?
• 9:39
  Tim Montague: So, yeah, if you're, if you're considering doing a solar project, sign on the dotted line today, and you might capture the ITC. You know, because for resi installers, they're booked, and they're going to get double booked now, and there's only so much work they can do in so much time. So the window is closing on what you can get accomplished in 2025 and you know, commercial has a little more runway, and that's great, as it should be. And I just you know, so buckle up.
• 10:15
  Tim Montague: Read this article on Norton rose Fulbright. We'll put a link in the show notes. The full audio version will come out on Tuesday with show notes, so you can look forward to that. And anything else about the BBB, we should say
• 10:31
  John Weaver: absolutely no.
• 10:31
  John Weaver: There's a couple of other items in this document, one of them that's positive. Actually, accelerated depreciation is back, and I think the accelerated depreciation applies to wind and solar. So if you scroll down the document, you can see where they reference depreciation. But there was.
• 10:48
  John Weaver: Also another thing that occurred the when a solar at least I, you know, I'm not exactly sure on when, because I build solar, but solar had been moved to the five year depreciation table. So we got, you know, 20% year one, 30% year two, two years of 19% then 11% then 5% and that was our depreciation table for solar, and then occasion. And right now we're within an accelerated bonus period. I think this year is 40% or 60% I you know, I gotta look at my spreadsheet, but it's now back to 100% accelerated depreciation. That's like 15 to 17 to 20% of a project's cost. You know, 15 to 17 maybe in year one. Now that's not giving you extra money, because it's the same depreciation you'd get either way. However, it's depreciation that comes fast. So that's positive. That's a nice one. The real question is, I just I it's with my lawyers, and maybe our LinkedIn user knows, but I've asked my lawyers to verify. I even asked Jenny Chase from Bloomberg if her team could verify. But is wind and solar on the 100% accelerated table, or is it to the 12 year table, which is now seemingly what wind and solar is by default, instead of being the five year table by default, which is a lot different that that that spreads cash out for a lot of years. So I'm hoping that we're now in the one year table, and it seems permanent from the language, or at least in for the short term, we don't have to think about it.
• 12:29
  John Weaver: It'll be at least through the end of 2029, at one version of the document. So depreciation is another thing we need to look at and firm up and understand exactly. And that one could help a little bit. There's a lot of stuff within that document. This Fiat stuff is going to be very challenging as a company. We're going to start working in batteries soon. We're hoping we're going to start soliciting utility, stale, scale construction, we have a partner that we're starting to communicate with, and that's a that's a discussion, that's a really important discussion, because if we're really going to drop some battery containers, we have a maximum amount of fiox stuff we can deal with. And Like for instance, the best battery company on Earth, in my opinion, Catal, C, A, T L, yep, they're on the list, yep. And so is BYD.
• 13:19
  John Weaver: I Well, I'm not 100% on BYD. I'm 100% on cable. They've actually had to be removed from a Marine Base, A, C, A, T L, project. So we got to figure that out, and we got to work through that and see how that's going to work.
• 13:36
  John Weaver: And, you know, I saw, there's an article in our list that the price of batteries, there's a new big bid for 25 gigawatt hours of capacity, just geez, and the bid was down to $51 per kilowatt hour. Timothy, it's it was down from that magical bid earlier this year. That was like 61 so another 20% dry price drop on a on a full container system.
• 14:04
  John Weaver: That's pretty exciting. And so I'm still trying to learn about import tariffs, what we're really going to have to pay for batteries to get them into the country. I saw an interesting article recently that suggested the battery pricing now, with the tariffs, with all the different items, was getting near ish, the peak we had during COVID. So because the stuff coming out of China has dropped, it's now up with tariffs. That means it's still down from prior years, when it was hard, but not terribly. So it seems like even with the tariffs, the price of batteries could work for a while, but, but this is going to be challenging to watch and you know, and now there's new rules about construction, start dates and finish dates. That mostly applies to solar, doesn't apply to the battery stuff, because that's through 2033 but it's complex. So there's multiple layers within this document. The fioc is one of them. The end of the ITC for wind and solar.
• 15:05
  John Weaver: There's a second one, the start date versus finish date is important. And now, as of recently, new executive order came out where the Treasury is being directed to become more explicit and more aggressive with policing, Safe Harbor and construction start. And so we got to figure out what that's going to mean, because construction start dates matter a lot for a lot of people, when we start safe, harboring and locking in certain incentives.
• 15:39
  John Weaver: So, so there's things to watch.
• 15:39
  John Weaver: I mean, luckily, we're on the commercial side, so it's a little bit easier for us. You know, our time frames are shorter than a utility scale, but, but it's. Something, something that matters.
• 15:55
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I, I it's just nonsensical, really, because the administration says they want to promote Made in America and American manufacturing, and yet, everything they're doing is scaring manufacturers away from the United States right now. And you know, I had a conversation with Norm Taft from Generac at Midwest solar Expo a couple weeks ago, and he was like, Yeah, this just makes us our business super complicated, because while we're an American company, the parts and pieces are made overseas, generally speaking, and so we're we're just scrambling to try to find sources that are not going to get too tariffed, or, in this case, fioc. So it's making work for attorneys and, I guess, supply chain experts, but it's really going to slow the economy down, and it's ultimately going to cause energy prices to go up.
• 17:02
  Tim Montague: That is the resounding drum beat that I see in the industry media, right? Energy prices are going to go up for consumers, for business owners. And
• 17:15
  John Weaver: right there, Tim on our page, on our document, and this is going to be, you're going to hear me say something really mean, Tim, and I shouldn't say it, but I'm going to, and I feel bad about it, but I don't I'm happy to see the price of electricity start going up now. And, and it's going to hurt us. It's going to hurt poor people, which really sucks. Yep, gonna hurt, you know, families that are just trying to heat their house and feed their kids and, and I, you know, growing up on welfare. Tim, literally, on welfare section eight, government food, government housing, government cheese. I know that an extra 50 bucks, 100 bucks a month hurts, because that's food. That's, you know, that's whatever it is, whatever you're going to pay for. So, so we're going to see the price of electricity start to accelerate upwards right now, even the price of, you know, broader grid upgrades are going to go up, irrelevant of what we're dealing with in the solar industry, because the price of copper is going to go up. And I'm working, I'm going to show you that in a moment, a series of tweets, series of blue sky tweets, that I went through dealing with my own projects. And this is going to be something that's going to be broad, and anybody that's trying to make a thing, an electric panel, a transformer, a DC to DC Dyna power. So dynapower is one of my favorite companies. They're awesome down there in Vermont. They make a DC to DC converter for batteries, so that we can, you know, DC couple batteries. That thing is full of copper. I mean, I've been to their warehouse, their factory, where they assemble them, yeah. And there's just giant copper spinning machines with people, you know, touching it with their hands and making sure it's shaped right. It's it's just cool and and now all that copper, man, it's going up, and we're going to see the electric companies push the price of electricity up. It's going to hurt small families, poor people. It's not going to affect people like me anymore, because my life has moved long, far beyond the cost of electricity. But you know, it is going to affect it's going to affect manufacturers. Affect any business that uses a lot of electricity. It's going to affect, you know, large corporates that have a lot of AC and you know what's going to do good for you and I Tim, and this is where I start to feel guilty, but stop caring. It's going to push up the price of electricity, which makes our ROIs be better. So the price of electricity goes up 5% the return on investment on solar goes up 5% or 1% or whatever it is. And so there's going to be a back and forth effect. I'm already in a New England region where I see people with 30 cent per kilowatt hour electricity, yeah. And
• 20:01
  Tim Montague: well, and you mentioned low income people, you know, the BBB cuts Medicaid for something like 10 to 15 million people. And you know, the pitchforks will eventually come out, John, if we hurt poor people too much, we already have a huge low income population in the United States, and I'm surprised that there's not more unrest, but if you stick it to them harder, they have no choice but to rise up, and then it's chaos and a bloodbath, and it's not good for anybody.
• 20:34
  John Weaver: So that's why we just spent 170 billion on ice, the largest non military police force on earth.
• 20:42
  Tim Montague: Yeah, we're busy creating a police state. It makes me not want to live in the future of America, but we're. We We have so many things to talk about. Yes, and I do want to answer be Shay's question, it appears that hydrogen production and fuel cells benefited from the BBB. Can you guys discuss what you're seeing there? I don't. I maybe you have a tech, more technical response. My response is that's fine, if it does support hydrogen and fuel cells, I'm good with that. The runway for those sectors is long, and, you know, they will be a growing share, so to speak, of the economy, but they're not going to be major players in the near term because of what it takes to make them such. That's my my opinion.
• 22:35
  John Weaver: Well, what I'm looking at I see extensions for hydrogen production tax credit and for fuel cells. So there is some support there. I'm not as deep into the hydrogen stuff, to be honest, just because it's still very early and I'm building solar. But it does look like the 30% fuel tax credit extended into 2032 which is interesting. Tim, actually, the BBB extended the tax credit for a bunch of stuff from the end of 2032 to the end of 33 which is weird. I don't know why they did that, but some items got an extra year, yeah? Why? Whereas solar got hack, yeah, so, so, Mr. Shea, sorry. Don't have a lot of
• 23:21
  Tim Montague: solid Yeah. And, I mean, I got it, but I did an interview. I did an interview with Peter Kelly Detweiler.
• 23:27
  Tim Montague: Peter Kelly Detweiler, check him out. He does a weekly news show.
• 23:30
  Tim Montague: He covers hydrogen a lot. And you know, there's, there is a hydrogen economy. It is mostly a fossil fuel based hydrogen economy today, of course, we can split water with electrons, and we could use clean electrons, and that is the holy grail, in some regards, to make clean hydrogen, right with, you know, one cent. If we can get to one cent, some people say it will unlock green hydrogen, and that will be a thing. But in the meanwhile, it's, you know, it's, it's just small potatoes. And when you think about grid, like the grid and Greening the Grid, I don't see hydrogen playing a major role there. It's, you know, it's a longer term, yeah,
• 24:15
  John Weaver: longer term.
• 24:15
  John Weaver: Essentially, maybe I'm hoping, I believe, I believe in hydrogen.
• 24:18
  John Weaver: I do, especially once we have much more electricity than we can deal with and the price of these fuel cells. Yeah,
• 24:25
  Tim Montague: and it can be used. It can be used for, for over the road trucking. It doesn't make sense for personal vehicles, but, you know, energetically, it makes sense for over the road trucking. So.
• 24:38
  Tim Montague: But I have a couple of announcements John that I wanted to make before we go any further, and I'm going to put one of those on screen. That is the No, that's not that. I don't know if I can share this. Go to cleanpowerhour.com, go to the events tab. We are hosting a webinar with Helga biernath and Ian score. Helga is the CEO of Sunstall and Sunzaun, a vertical bi facial racking company, okay.
• 25:11
  Tim Montague: And, you know, I asked him yesterday in a in a pre event.
• 25:16
  Tim Montague: The event is, uh, July 15, Okay, so next Tuesday, at 9am Pacific, 11am Central, 1pm 12pm Eastern.
• 25:21
  Tim Montague: And I asked Helga, the CEO of Sunzaun. He's also the CEO of Sunstall, a mechanical installer. So he knows racking inside and out. You know where the interest is coming from. And he said, Well, Tim, largely Europe. And you know, so when you look at the news on vertical racking, it's mostly from Europe and Asia today, but tomorrow.
• 25:49
  Tim Montague: You know, it makes a lot of sense that you could do vertical solar and then have bigger rows for cropping, still, right? You don't have to have just solar panels on what was a farm field, and that's the benefit of much greater dual use capability with vertical solar. And interesting fact, it only reduces the output of the solar by about 20% when you do north south rows, so east west facing solar panels with vertical racking. So check that out. And then and and Ian score is sandbox solar. We also have Professor Majdi from UC Davis and John Langdon, who is solar saves farms. He is an advocate for farmers. He is a farmer himself. Myself in Oregon. So look forward to that on Tuesday next week, the 15th of July. The other announcement, John is that I finally am launching my book.
• 26:48
  Tim Montague: It is called Wired for the sun.
• 26:53
  Tim Montague: You can look for more information coming out on social media about this wired for the sun, the commercial solar playbook. I'll try to put the cover on screen here, but sharing things with stream yard is less than easy. Um, here we go. Let's see front. Can you see that? Yes. Okay, excellent. So I, you know, when I got into solar, John, probably much like yourself, I had so many questions and relatively few answers. And you turn to, you know, the resources online, and you learn quickly that there's a plethora of resources around residential solar, but very limited resources around commercial and utility solar.
• 27:39
  Tim Montague: And so that's why I wrote this book. It's for anybody who wants to understand and ultimately develop, sell and close commercial solar projects and and so if you're a facility owner, you'll benefit from this.
• 27:58
  Tim Montague: And if you're a solar professional or an aspiring solar professional, you're going to benefit from this. I'm self publishing the book on Amazon, and we're about, oh, a week or two away from the full launch, but you can look forward to that. And with that, I will say, let's move on to the news, and I'll close that window, if I can. And
• 28:24
  John Weaver: also, you launched your swag store, Clean Power Hour, and I got a nice outer jacket that was used perfectly yesterday. Oh, good rain and heavy as I rode my bike into the office and and I was happy to that. So glad
• 28:41
  Tim Montague: to hear it. Yeah, check it out cleanpowerhour.com just go to shop, and I don't make any money from the swag.
• 28:48
  Tim Montague: It's just good for my listenership and viewers. And you can get nice T shirts, like this one. You can get polos, you can get jackets. You can get a hard hat now John and a high vis vest. I added a few things for construction workers and geeks like you who visit construction sites.
• 29:08
  John Weaver: I go construction sites, I have to wear a hard hat quite a bit these days.
• 29:12
  Tim Montague: Yep, yep. So
• 29:14
  John Weaver: I got a story to tell Tim. It's in a few parts from a series of tweets on blue sky regarding the price of copper. Okay, that's what I want to tell us about. So what we're dealing with right now, folks, is that we now have a new copper tariff coming. It hasn't officially hit. It won't hit for three weeks, but it's been announced. And here this first message. This is the cost of copper over the last year, already up 27% some of my reading has suggested that a lot of this price increase in the US, because this is us copper Futures, a lot of this price increase is due to the belief that this tariff was coming, and so domestic copper buyers were snapping up all the capacity.
• 29:59
  John Weaver: There's massive volumes of copper, I'm guessing, stored within the United States, that were bought at much cheaper prices. And now it's coming. So first off, over the last year, we have this 27% up, I quote projects a year out. So this is stressful to me, seeing this chart. I quote copper in projects. It's 1% of a project, 2% that's four cents, six cents, three cents, it's up 27% so that's a penny, a penny and a half that's disappeared from last year. So that's last year.
• 30:33
  John Weaver: $5.09 that's that's the cost.
• 30:39
  John Weaver: Then we got little little notice here. Trump says it's happening August 1. This just came out July 8. So this is phase two of the story. Now, that first post I made here, let me go back one.
• 30:52
  John Weaver: Let me go to this one. This is 13 days ago. So this is a little bit ago. This is June 27 so now we're July 11. So now yesterday, or the the following day we got this one copper up. That's July 8, so that's three days ago. So now the morning after, we keep clicking the wrong thing. Look at this, bam, right after that announcement. Now we see $5.50 now maybe it fell off a tiny bit, but it just went from that number that we were talking about that I showed you 509, whatever, just jump 13% that's a big number. And so now, oops, keep clicking the wrong one. Now this is from a Reuters article.
• 31:33
  John Weaver: The US copper price is now 138% above. For the global price. So that means we're paying more than double the global price of copper now. And you know, I hear people constantly complaining, why does residential solar cost so much in the US? How is it that Germany has it for $1 a watt. You know why I pay $1 a watt for hardware alone? That's it. You want to install solar.
• 32:10
  John Weaver: It costs you a buck for your gear. Germany gets it for $1 the total system. You know why their modules cost 10 cents a watt? My modules cost 40 cents a watt.
• 32:22
  John Weaver: What's your choice? Public you want tariffs, you want this, you want that. You want domestic protections. Great, you got it now. You got three bucks a watt solar. And here's part of the reason your copper is more than double the global copper price.
• 32:37
  John Weaver: So that's it. And then here's some hard numbers. This is a project I'm working on now. This is a project that we're just construction. We're not even procuring all the hardware. So the numbers are off a little.
• 32:47
  John Weaver: This is a carport, so it's really a $3 a watt project. But this is the copper change that just occurred. We just added$23,000 to a project just on the cost of copper. So it's not trivial. I buy six figures worth of copper every year. That number is going to double now.
• 33:11
  John Weaver: So what's going to happen with that? I don't know. I just I it's and in
• 33:18
  Tim Montague: your mind, what is Trump trying to accomplish?
• 33:23
  John Weaver: In my mind, he's attempting to do tax cuts for the wealthy and using tariffs to fund it as well. Using tariffs to negotiate with countries externally, and I don't know, use it for leverage in negotiations for stuff. I don't really believe it's to help the economy or rebuild domestic stuff. I think it's I think it's about leverage and negotiations.
• 33:53
  John Weaver: I think it's about, I don't know, getting some sort of deal for himself. I'm not very positive on his motivations. I don't think he's pro us very much. I think he's pro something, but so so that. So that's my story. Copper's up.
• 34:08
  John Weaver: Copper just doubled over the last week. Not double. Just went up, I don't know, 20% 30% just double the world. And it just added $23,000 to one of my projects. So if you were wondering why solar is going up, why it's this, why it's that, you know, it's here's here's part of your reason it's you are paying more for solar gear in the United States than you are anywhere else on Earth. And you know, all right, I guess that's it. That's the world we chose so for that. So that's my copper story. Sorry guys, but, you know, I spent a lot on copper, and so that pay I pay attention, and it stresses me. Yeah,
• 34:48
  Tim Montague: I mean, I just asked, perplexity, how big the US copper industry is. We do mine, copper in the US,
• 34:56
  John Weaver: got a big plant down Arizona, half of our meats.
• 34:59
  John Weaver: We
• 34:59
  Tim Montague: only make 5% of world copper output, right? So are we, you know, we only domestically, source 5% and so we're importing a lot of copper.
• 35:17
  John Weaver: Well, I believe that half, yeah. So this is what I heard about, half of copper consumed in the US is produced domestically, okay? And two thirds of it comes from a single mine in Arizona. So half of the copper that we're using now just went up in price massively. And domestic folks will follow that by increasing their price just because they can. It's, you know, right? That's capitalism, right? You see an opportunity.
• 35:49
  John Weaver: You're a fool to leave a market position open. So expect even the domestic people, so that they can get higher profits, will push their copper price up.
• 35:57
  John Weaver: And that's, that's what we're going to deal with. So price of solar just went up a penny, two, three, something in that range, just for the copper. Yep. So, so what we're using, a lot more aluminum FYI long wire runs.
• 36:13
  John Weaver: We'll be spending some on aluminum, quite a bit,
• 36:18
  Tim Montague: all right. Well, let's move on. It's not a happy the copper situation is, is, yeah, that's not happy. Do we have any good news project of the week? Tim, all right, all right, let's talk about that. We got lots of good
• 36:33
  John Weaver: news. All the rest of the articles are good news.
• 36:35
  John Weaver: We got through the crap.
• 36:37
  Tim Montague: This is the Tesla Mega Pack project.
• 36:40
  John Weaver: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
• 36:40
  John Weaver: We dropped a. We did a pick for a Mega Pack. We can't install it yet. Let me share some of my pictures here, and but we can't install yet. We're still waiting a little bit, but it's coming.
• 36:51
  John Weaver: So here's a here's a Tesla Mega Pack. We this was on site. This is in Massachusetts. Is actually on a military base, and so we have to put it on some planks, because we can't start installing it for a couple of weeks. But the Mega Pack showed up early, so we put down some gravel. There's a few layers underneath that gravel, then we have some nice, heavy wood planks on it. And we just, you know, we picked a battery. And here's the carport, the solar carport that it's associated with. You can see the SMA solar inverter here that's going to be connected to the solar park carport to be a nice micro grid system on a military base. And I'm kind of excited about doing batteries, because number one, the ITC is on batteries. For a very long time. Got almost a decade of battery construction coming, and we have a partnership that we're hoping to develop and turn into something heavy and strong, where we are going to be the EPC local branch of a of a battery company. And hopefully you get to hear me talk about a utility scale battery in our, you know, medium term future,
• 38:05
  Tim Montague: yeah, so and how many? How many kWh or megawatt hours is the battery? This, this particular project,
• 38:13
  John Weaver: this unit, I believe this is a one and a half megawatt, four megawatt hour, but I don't explicitly know, because I know it's evolved and it they could be getting bigger, but I'm not on the procurement of the battery side. A lot of the technical details, I don't even, we don't even have access to. It's no know what you got to know and build it is our job. So you're the installer. We are the We Are the installer. Yes, the only thing we're procuring is a little bit of copper and some machines so, but that's our battery drop, so I'm just excited. It's our first drop of a shipping container size battery, full shipping container battery. We have a few others, smaller, redone. We actually have a few that we're working on right now. Pretty soon, we'll have a three and a half megawatt solar project that has eight ish megawatt hours of batteries on it. I believe could be six again. Yeah, designs are changing. So
• 39:06
  Tim Montague: I was just, I was just reviewing a little video I did a couple months ago on the value stack of battery storage.
• 39:13
  Tim Montague: And my friends at intelligent generation, the software as a service company here in the Midwest, have created a moniker, earn, save, protect. You can earn money with grid services like frequency regulation with a battery, okay, that's a cash machine. You can save money by attacking demand charges or capacity charges, or both demand charges and capacity charges are cousins of one another. In California, for example, you're often trying to attack demand charges. Here in the Midwest, we're attacking capacity charges. A capacity Day is a day when the grid is humming at full capacity, and you get a notification the day before, and then you can attack that window.
• 39:58
  Tim Montague: It's a two hour window, and that could be 30% of your power bill.
• 40:04
  Tim Montague: So earn, save and then protect from grid outages, right? If you don't have a battery and the grid goes down, your solar isn't going to do anything for you.
• 40:11
  Tim Montague: Unfortunately, you need a battery and the ability to micro grid, and then you can be sustain, you know, self sustaining, or at least have ride through, if you're an industrial facility, that's what we would normally use batteries for. You can't do like full off grid operations with a big manufacturing facility, because the battery would be so large, it just wouldn't be economical.
• 40:37
  Tim Montague: But you can do what we would call ride through, so you can avoid an uncontrolled shutdown in, say, a plastics manufacturing facility where they're doing like injection molding, right? If the grid says, Hey, I'm about to have a brown out, the battery switches into micro grid mode, and then you can gradually shut things down in a controlled manner. So what else should we talk about in our last few minutes together? John,
• 41:11
  John Weaver: how about that? We crossed two cool lines over the last couple of months in the United States, in terms of solar output. The state of California, officially, and I'm going to share this one state of California has now become a solar state. Officially, the number one source of electricity over the last 12 months in the state of California is our good friend. I. The giant fusion ball in the sky. It has overcome gas.
• 41:47
  John Weaver: And don't expect this to ever turn back right here. And so this is pretty cool. And you know, we expected it in California first to happen. I made a comment on LinkedIn. I said, as California goes, the nation goes, and if that's the case, then this is a real good thing to see right here. And it's not all perfect and pretty stuff, because if you look at this curve, you know this thing going back over the years looks like gas is kind of stuck here for a little bit. And so that's good point. How we're going to deal with that. We're not sure.
• 42:20
  John Weaver: If you come down here and you look at the hydroelectric you can see that the the droughts out west have really led, I mean, it's almost an inverse curve of the natural gas and the hydroelectric. So we have to deal with that. And if you come down here, I mean, you could just see it clearly. This is gas. Over the decade it it hasn't fallen, express aggressively, right? But it's fallen now and and I would argue, you know, over the last year or two, and I'm gonna do an article soon, I'm gonna do some math in California on curtailment, I believe the amount of curtailment that's happening as a percentage is starting to fall now. I have to do the math, though, and the reason it's starting to fall is because batteries are capturing more of the daytime, pumping it into the evening as they're expanding and and batteries are big. You know, it's even beyond this number. Now, it's beyond 15 gigawatts now, because this is April and we're in July, so we're gaining on 20 gigawatts of capacity soon in California, which is going to push near 6070, 80 gigawatt hours, because the majority of this stuff is four gigawatt hours of capacity, almost all the utility scale and and so that's cool. So California is officially and and percentage wise, here it is during that period, during the last 12 months, solar is 33.9% of California's electricity, while gas is 33 and a third. So that's awesome. It's just it's nice, and gas represents roughly all of the fossils burnt in California for electricity. So about a two thirds clean energy in California. That's awesome. I mean, it's beautiful. It's one of the largest economic collections of human activity on Earth. And bam, two thirds cleanish, mostly clean. There's some landfill and biogas, which isn't clean, clean, but close enough for this argument today, and and that's just, that's a joy. So that's a good news. So how's that? Tim, I love
• 44:28
  Tim Montague: it. If California, if California can do it, anyone, any country, any state can do it. I mean, California is a country size state, right? It's the fifth largest economy in the world, and so stick that in your eye. Whoever questions the green new scam, as some people call it, it is not a scam. It is just fusion, a fusion reactor in the sky raining down 1000s of times more energy than we could possibly ever want.
• 45:00
  John Weaver: So last one solar surpasses 10% of US electricity for the first time in April. And that was kind of neat. And it's probably gonna do it again in May, but I was just it's the first time it's occurred, and that was April. That's according to the EIA, and that's pretty neat. So, so it's still growing.
• 45:22
  John Weaver: We're still growing. It's coming. It's not going to stop.
• 45:26
  John Weaver: It's growing everywhere. We're going to slow down a little bit here our growth pace and whatever, we'll have to figure it out and keep pushing. But, but the change is happening, and the electricity, the infrastructure, is still getting built and and deep down, that's what I care about, and I don't know what's coming next Tim, but I'm gonna keep pounding because whatever, what else are you gonna do? Can't just go home and cry That's That's not legal or something. I don't know
• 45:55
  Tim Montague: you could do that, but it wouldn't be advisable.
• 45:59
  Tim Montague: All right. Well, thank you so much, John. It's always a pleasure seeing all the journalism you're doing and thank you for all the great news. I want to remind our listeners that they can find all of these recordings on our YouTube channel and at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review, tell a friend about the show and reach out to us on LinkedIn. John, how can our listeners find you?
• 46:26
  John Weaver: Commercialsolarguy.com, that's our website. Gotta contact us. Page. You can also send us a phone or an email info at commercial solar guy, I'm on LinkedIn. Give us a ring. 5084999, stun and I. Uh, commercialsolarguy.com, that's the best place we write articles. I'm also on PV magazine USA and blue sky, and I don't know, all over the place, all over the internet. So you can find us. Just type in commercial solar guy, you will find us.
• 46:56
  Tim Montague: Yes, you will with that. I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague, thanks so much. You.